Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

jmmv.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 72 posts

Re: Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

#41

Post by bluedino »

maccard wrote: post #7

The author mentions rewriting core applications in C# on windows but I don’t think this is the problem. Write a simple hello world app in c#, compile it and see how long it takes to run vs a rust app or a python script - it’s almost native. Unity is locked to a horrifically ancient version of mono and still manages to do a lot of work in a small period of time. (If we start talking JavaScript or python on the other h…

I agree that these are very simple cases, and it's like benchmarking compiliation or execution of helloworld.cpp

It would be interesting to see something like:

- cold boot

- load Windows

- load Office

- open a 200 page document

- create pdf from said document

- open 5000 row spreadsheet

- do a mail merge

- open 150,000 record database

- generate some goofy report

Do people still do mail merge? Not sure.

Re: Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

#42

Post by thenthenthen »

jmmv wrote: post #15

Original author here! Thanks for (re)sharing. We previously discussed this at length in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 . I think this article has "aged well" in the sense that... nothing has changed for the better :( Since I wrote it, I did upgrade my machine: I now have a 24-core 13th Gen i7 laptop with a fast NVMe drive and... well, Windows 11 is _still_ visibly laggy throughout. Comparing it to KDE…

I just got a second hand M1 Air, upgrading from 10 year old MacbookPro… wow. The animations on the new MacOS are slow as hell tho. Any way to speed them up? On iOS is it a breeze (no jailbreak): https://cowabun.ga/ (Choose: CowabungaLite)

Re: Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

#43

Post by Borg3 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #35
RetroTechie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also complexity - added more than necessary, and @ a faster pace than hardware can keep up with. Take font rendering: in early machines, fonts were small bitmaps (often 8x8 pixels, 1 bit/pixel), hardcoded in ROM. As screen resolutions grew (and varied between devices), OSes stored fonts in different sizes. Later: scalable fonts, chosen from a selection of styles / font families, rendered to sub-pixel accuracy, s…

> But it also makes rendering each single character a lot more complex. Not millions of times more complex. Except for some outliers that mess up everything (like anything from Microsoft), almost all of the increased latency between keypress and character rendering we see on modern computers comes from optimizing for modularity and generalization instead of specialized code for handling the keyboard. Not even our har…

Im not really sure what are you talking about ;) HW become much much much faster. Mostly in speed of computing, but latency also dropped nicely. The letency bloat you see its 99% of software (OS). I still run Win2003 on modern desktop, and it flies! Really, booting/shutdown is quick. Im on spinning rust, so first start of webbrowser is slowish a bit, but once cached, its like 200ms-500ms depending on version (more modern = slower).

Re: Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

#44

Post by M95D »

maccard wrote: post #38
nottorp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unity is locked to a horrifically ancient version of mono and still manages to do a lot of work in a small period of time Unity is the great battery killer! The last example I remember is that I could play the first xcom remake (which had a native mac version) on battery for 3-4 hours, while I was lucky to get 2 hours for $random_unity_based_indie with less graphics.

In my defence, I never said it was efficient! Games always suck for battery because they’re constantly rendering.

They don't need to. Enable v-sync.

Re: Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

#45

Post by Narishma »

maccard wrote: post #38
nottorp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unity is locked to a horrifically ancient version of mono and still manages to do a lot of work in a small period of time Unity is the great battery killer! The last example I remember is that I could play the first xcom remake (which had a native mac version) on battery for 3-4 hours, while I was lucky to get 2 hours for $random_unity_based_indie with less graphics.

In my defence, I never said it was efficient! Games always suck for battery because they’re constantly rendering.

> Games always suck for battery because they’re constantly rendering.

Only the badly designed ones.

Re: Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

#46

Post by genewitch »

maccard wrote: post #34
genewitch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I begin to wonder if all the commenters in this thread have compromised devices. I'm on a 5 year old Samsung (the model is, I bought it new six months ago) - my Linux machines are fast (gentoo) and my windows 10 and 11 machines are fast. My kid's computer is an i3 7350k and he plays roblox, Minecraft, teardown on it with no issues. That computer is a couple years older than he is at 9-10 years old. That computer's tw…

Did you watch the videos linked in the article? > I'm on a 5 year old Samsung (the model is, I bought it new six months ago) How quick is the Share menu on your samsung? On mine, it takes about 3 seconds of repainting itself before it settles down. On iOS there's about a 100ms pause and the drawer pops up, fully populated. I found [0] which is a perfect example of this sort of bloat. > My main computer is beefy, thou…

No i was referring only to the comments here. The share menu comes up real fast, there's no "delay", as soon as the menu with "share" goes away, the bottom slides up and the share panel appears, icons populated.

Is Slack also electron? a cursory search says discord is electron. Now, firefox lags to start, too - compared to edge, which is nearly instant to "launch". Brave is also I don't use windows terminal, i use pwsh 7.5.x, and it's this is what i am talking about, i don't notice anything slow on my computer, any of my computers, really. This leads me to believe that either the people who do experience slowness have a compromised system, or some other issue. 5400 RPM data/boot drive, only using electron apps (which are slow in general), or otherwise misconfigured.

I haven't used Ubuntu desktop since they tampered with the system menu/start menu, so i have no idea what that is like now. The server can be snappy, though - you just have to configure networking and the like correctly. I'm not a fan of systemd; that colors my opinion of a lot of linux systems. I use Gentoo and Devuan because they fully support OpenRC, which i consider vastly superior for my use cases. However, i do maintain a couple of ubuntu based OSes for neighbors on HP EliteDesk SFF computers, and they seem alright, 3-4x as fast as an rpi3/4 at ubuntu desktop, as far as launch lag and boot times and the like.

I think to put this to bed, we need to establish a baseline or at least a list of applications to launch while screen recording, and then literally count frames. It would be funny if this was all perception and it wasn't actually "slow", that is, "seconds to load" is actually like 2 seconds, and not 12...

Re: Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

#47

Post by bigstrat2003 »

I think that the author is spot on about the cause of the problem: software developers (meaning the organizations that produce software, not necessarily the individuals writing code) prioritize selfish goals like ease of development or profits over the quality of the product. This has resulted in a lot of software being quite terrible. Not just slow (though definitely slow), but also buggy and crammed full of features that users hate (but which make the developer money). The only market that seems to reliably produce quality software any more is the open source community, because they are making the software that they themselves use and their incentives are aligned with users.

Re: Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

#48

Post by lelanthran »

maccard wrote: post #32
lelanthran wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incrementally async load 500 icon or text files and have them run through all the same slowness” This really shouldn't be slower when done asynchronously compared to synchronously. I would expect, actually, that it would be faster (all available cores get used).

> I would expect, actually, that it would be faster (all available cores get used). And I think this assumption is what's killing us. Async != parallel for a start, and parallel IO is not guaranteed to be fast. If you write a function: async Task LoadFile(string path) { var f = await load_file(path); return new ImageFile(f); } And someone comes along and makes it into a batch operation; async Task > LoadFiles(List pa…

Why would someone put an await inside a loop?

Don't get me wrong... I believe you have seen it, I just can't understand the thought process that led to that.

In my mind, await is used when you want to use the result, not when you store it or return it.

Re: Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

#49

Post by zokier »

RetroTechie wrote: post #28
maeln wrote: post #11

More than CPU speed, I think the increase in storage and RAM is to blame for the slow decay in latency. When you have only a few Kb/Mb of RAM and storage, you can't really afford to add much more to the software than what is the core feature. Your binary need to be small, which lead to faster loading in RAM, and do less, which means less things to run before the actual program. When size is not an issue, it's harder…

It's also complexity - added more than necessary, and @ a faster pace than hardware can keep up with. Take font rendering: in early machines, fonts were small bitmaps (often 8x8 pixels, 1 bit/pixel), hardcoded in ROM. As screen resolutions grew (and varied between devices), OSes stored fonts in different sizes. Later: scalable fonts, chosen from a selection of styles / font families, rendered to sub-pixel accuracy, s…

I'm not sure your font rendering is very good example here. Windows has used vector fonts since 90s and ClearType since Windows XP. That is nearly 25 years ago. And it wasn't really much of a performance issue even back then.

Re: Fast machines, slow machines (2023)

#50

Post by tedunangst »

thenthenthen wrote: post #42
jmmv wrote: post #15

Original author here! Thanks for (re)sharing. We previously discussed this at length in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503983 . I think this article has "aged well" in the sense that... nothing has changed for the better :( Since I wrote it, I did upgrade my machine: I now have a 24-core 13th Gen i7 laptop with a fast NVMe drive and... well, Windows 11 is _still_ visibly laggy throughout. Comparing it to KDE…

I just got a second hand M1 Air, upgrading from 10 year old MacbookPro… wow. The animations on the new MacOS are slow as hell tho. Any way to speed them up? On iOS is it a breeze (no jailbreak): https://cowabun.ga/ (Choose: CowabungaLite)

The only slow animation I noticed is the genie effect when minimizing, but you can switch to a zoom effect and it's fastish.
Post reply on HN